Tencent Internship — Our experiences from Innovation & Solution Group (ISG) team
Hello everyone!! Tencent is a company that has rapidly grown and gained recognition, not just in China, but globally. Recently, we have been fortunate enough to intern for the company’s branch in Thailand with the ISG team and today, we will be answering possible questions that you may have regarding our experience.
Before we continue, we suppose we should begin by introducing ourselves.
“Hello, I’m Pathid Liamtrakoolpanich (Pat) currently a rising sophomore studying at Yale University”
“Hi, I’m Thanathai Lertpetchpun (Save). At the present, I am an upcoming senior from Computer Engineering at Chulalongkorn University.”
“Hello, I’m Patarapornkan Anantarangsi (Patt). I am a rising junior studying Information and Communication Engineering at Chulalongkorn University”
“Hello, I’m Vasin Chongcharoenkit (Folk). I’m studying as a rising senior at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Computer Engineering.”
“Hello, I’m Krittamate Tiankanon (Boom). I am a senior studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology”
“Hello, I am Nithiwat Seesillapachai (Ter), a senior studying Computer Science and Economics at Duke University”
And together, we are the six interns in Tencent’s Innovation and Solutions group.
How did we work together during COVID-19?
The COVID-19 pandemic had forced us to Work From Home. Yet, that did not diminish the efficiency nor reduce the devotion that we had towards our tasks. Due to the nature of our work, most of our tasks could be done online, so the pandemic did not affect much of our team. We were able to share our files through online platforms such as GitHub, Tencent Cloud, and Google Drive and communicate with one another via Voov, Discord, and WeChat.
Our activities
Throughout the duration of this internship, our mentor assigned us two projects: the Sanook News Timeline and the Joox Song Recommendation.
Our first task was to scrape news from Thai news publishers, process them, and upload them to a database. We then built a data pipeline that fine-tuned a self-supervised Masked Language Model across multiple GPUs to identify and recommend related news for the Sanook news platform.
For our second project, we developed and fine-tuned a deep convolutional network on over 200,000 songs converted to spectrogram format. The model was able to identify and recommend similar songs at an acceptable level.
Our impressions
Each of us has different but equally great impressions of our time here at Tencent:
“Despite the difficulties brought upon by the COVID-19 pandemic, my experience at Tencent has given me multiple valuable things that would be difficult to find elsewhere. Be it the friendships made with my fellow interns, the skills gained from working, or the satisfaction of knowing that my work would contribute to real features of Tencent’s product, multiple things contributed to making the internship a truly unique and memorable experience” — Pathid Liamtrakoolpanich
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“On the first day of the internship, I was assigned to do various things which confused me a lot. However, P’Saran and his colleagues (our mentors) guided us and said “We do not care how much you know, all we care is how much you learn”. Tencent taught me not only what to learn but also how to learn. Moreover, I gain invaluable experience from Tencent: doing projects hands-on from scratch, owning the idea of how to do the project, and forming a firm friendship — Thanathai Lertpetchpun
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“This internship was an eye-opening experience. Throughout the internship, I got the opportunity to practice many new skills, from web scraping to fine-tuning various deep learning models. Despite having to work remotely, our mentor P’Saran and the ISG staff provided us with immediate support and also the resources that I would not be able to easily access elsewhere. On top of these, all the moments spent with fellow interns and the valuable advice from our mentor have made this internship a truly memorable one.” — Patarapornkan Anantarangsi
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“Internship at Tencent was my first internship and gave me amazing opportunities a lot more than I thought it would be. I got a lot of valuable knowledge and experience both in hard skills and soft skills. Not only some deep learning concepts such as Natural Language Processing and vector similarities that I have learnt, but also project hands-on which makes me improve my existing skills and clearly understand of various models effectively. At first, I did not understand what a data team like a data scientist and data engineer really do in a real situation. After this internship, I clearly saw the picture of what it is, and also knew what skills that I should improve and focus on to apply my career as data team in the future. Our mentor and the ISG staff always took care of us and gave us opportunities to think out of the box, feel free to discuss new ideas and advise the suitable solutions for us that are the valuable and memorable ones for me along the internship. ” — Vasin Chongcharoenkit
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“Tencent internship experience really widened my perspective about possible computer science career paths in Thailand. Universities never really taught us how things we see today on a website come to be. Even though we are interns, we got an opportunity to experience creating full-fledged website features starting from designing the databases, backends, API, up to designing the deployment cycle associated with it. ” — Krittamate Tiankanon
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“I love how Tencent mentors were always willing to spend time outside of work hours to help us set up, debug, and guide our projects. The project was both something cool and useful — a prototype for future features to be deployed in real life. This really goes to show how Tencent values interns and allows them to work on something that is going to matter, not just some pet project.” — Nithiwat Seesillapachai
We would like to thank everyone who has helped us thus far in our internship and for those reading this. If you are still searching for an internship or looking for a valuable experience, we highly encourage all of you to apply to Tencent Thailand☺.
